HistoryBuff

I remembered this car the other day, not s dramatic as some fully open J Deusies but I am curious if the widow sold it for a song. The auction company description from RM says "Many collectors attempted to acquire it in subsequent years. Eventually Bob Bahre was successful. He sold it to Robert Adams in February 1981 and Adams sold it to Rick Carroll in September 1983. Carroll passed it on to the Imperial Palace Collection two months later where it took a central place as one of the signature attractions in the IP's legendary collection of Duesenbergs until it was acquired in 1999 by the Dean V. Kruse Foundation, still in the badly deteriorated condition in which it had been rescued from Father Divine's carriage house. " I only care about the price to Bahre or the price to Adams. I think back in those days these were slightly better than used cars, as the big classic car auctions weren't being held yet...

I was going to check with him on the accuracy of something I am writing on the '77 Cadillac based Stutz Royale but though I can find the professor's website on Stutz, I can't find where on the stie you can click to get his e-mail. He is a college professor but hand built postwar cars are his strongest interest and I salute him for researching this subject. My e-mail is Photojournalistpro@gmail.com Thanks for any clues

Still interested is hearing why this car was built, on whose orders so to speak. Was this car built on 300B chassis or regular chassis? Do you think it was ordered by American officials to give him as a gift? (Shah got cars from leaders in several countries) What would it be worth today in the USA? Are the Iranians selling any cars out of the Museum? ww.carstyling.ru/resources/studios/1955_Ghia_Chrysler_Special_K300_Design-Sketch_02.jpg I'd open picture up but it wouldn't open--maybe somebody can do it and post it. Thanks

Well beauty is in the eye of the beholder, here's what it looks like http://www.shannons.com.au/auctions/lot/W53BC95D7AIT53F2/#.VKLbLHhkg I think the fenders and headlight position look like a Abbot bodied Bentley I've seen, I wonder if the bodywork is German? Anyway I'd like to know when the barn finder found it, where and what he paid. I know "one of one" makes it valuable but then since it didn't lead to a production series, doesn't that make it worth less. And it's ugly. I know , beauty is...

I read just today that he discovered it in 1983 abandoned in a field with accident damage. I am surprised it hadn't rusted out? Was it printed how he got wind of it, how he found the owner and how much he paid for it? Was it a fully functional car when built? Looking forward to hearing more about this "dream car."

I want to write something about a Jag with an Italian body. The green XK140, looking more Ferrari=is or Maserati-ish than Jaguar-ish, was found by a Scottsdale jeweler, a Mr. Gauthier, in Florida maybe in a service garage. I was wondering if any Jag guys know what it was priced at back then when he found it, as my theory is no one there had a clue how rare it was as Italian bodied Jags are seldom heard of. Or I could write my article about the XK150, in white, shown here http://www.coachbuild.com/index.php?option=com_gallery2&Itemid=50&g2_itemId=40888 This car is now being restored, but it seems like that one might still be in the same family all these years so never was a "barn find."

Maybe 20 years ago I had a picture, glossy print about 4"high, 6" wide , black and white from Pininfarina, the car design company and coachbuilder in Italy and it showed either a '55, 56 or '57 T-bird that looked very close to what Ford made. But now when I check Pininfarina history on the internet I can't find metnion of it. Didn't Budd Company in Detrit made the T-bird bodies? Is there a chance they would have gone to Pinin Farina (they spelled it as two words before 1961) to have a prototype made? Since it's black and white picture, I can't tell you the color of the car but it wasn't white or black. So either I am imagining it or such a car was built. If so, I wonder where it is today. I wish I had it so I could point out styling differances but as I remember it looked stock. One explanation I could theorize is that they bought their own Thunderbird to see how American sports cars are built but if it was a '57 why bother when Ford already had the four seater Bird in the pipeline for '58....

I hesitate to call this a "show car" in the same sense as the Mustang I because I think Vince Gardner did it, don't know on whose nickel, and it was displayed at the Ford Custom Car Caravan, which Ford sponsored. Supposedly actor Dale Robertson owned it but I haven't found if Robertson sold it directly to Don Chambers, car collector ,who sold it to Tom Maruska who restored it. I am writing a story about the car and would like to know what Robertson or Chambers sold it for? I saw pictures of it when Chambers had it parked outside, ill health cancelling his own restoration plans, so I am guessing it was rough and went for under $10,000. I don't know what Barrett-Jackson sold it for in 2006 but my question is--how to you value a car that was more "custom car" than factory concept car? One is designed by an automaker and the other by a free-lancer...

I foujd a story on this car on a website called Look What I found http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/06/look-at-what-i-found-1956-continental-mark-ii-convertible-by-hess-eisenhardt/ my question is:Now that more history is known about the car, is this car now considered a factory prototype or is it considered a dealer-commissioned prototype? Would it by any chance be worth over $100,000 today? Does anyone know what it was advertised for before Mr. Wolk bought it and restored it? Thanks for any info. PS It is a beautiful car, a more successful conversion of a coupe only car than the Buick Rivieras I have seen cut.

Hello I am an acolyte of Smokey Yunick, I like to read about his sneaky ways of prepping a car. I am writing something about the Boss 302 prepped by him for NASCAR and which was once in the Ross Meyer 3-Dog Garage collection in Boyertown, PA. Does anyone have an e-mail for Ross? I think it is now being raced in vintage trans-am by one of the Edelbrock girls. I'd like to hear from anyone familiar with how this car was found and what it was priced at back before Ross Meyer had it, or anyone collecting historical info. on this car. Thanks

The 1967 Oldsmobile Thor looks kinda Toronado, but I can't tell if it was on the regular Toronado chassis or the smaller chassis Bill Mitchell was orginally going to put the Toronado body on. Also the styling cues from the side look more like several cars designed by Tom Tjaarda who took over from Giugiaro as Ghia's head designer when Giugiaro left. This website has a good picture http://www.carstyling.ru/en/car/1967_oldsmobile_thor/images/22872/ I somehow don't believe Bill Mitchell assigned Ghia to build this. Maybe he got the chassis to them, and I know he was in love with the Ghia built DeTomaso Mangusta to order one, but I just don't see GM paying coachbuilders in Italy to build prototypes. Does anyone know what happened to this car? Another website http://www.lotusespritturbo.com/Oldsmobile_Thor_Ghia.htm says it was at the DeTomaso museum until 2004, and I kind of recognize the setting as i have been to their plant

Got some more history. All I am hoping for is someone to name the price this car was sold for by or to any of these owners. My theory is that, when it wore a Rolls Royce grille, it was the cheapest, because staunch Buick people were turned off by the "customization." But I need to know what it sold for at that price. Here's my potted chronology of ownership: This is what I found out about the car’s history so far. It was bought in 1938 by Sandra Planginton, the daughter of the man who had planned Grand Central station. She was a socialite, and after marrying a Count, Count Maxmilian de Pulaski (a relative of the famous general) she divorced him and married a Major Tisdale. The Major was a major Rolls collector and it was he who had the whimsical idea of installing a Rolls Royce radiator and a “thistle” hood ornament (still trying to figure out what that is). It could have been a relative of the major who, with his high school buddies, had fun with the car pretending it was a Rolls Royce chauffeured limo. It was then sold to a Michael Berry, an attorney in Michigan. He owned it until ’72 when he sold it to Kate Robbins, an assistant to the Classic Car Club of America official and in 1989 she sold it to a famous name in the car world, Roy Warshawsky ( who owned the JC Whitney mail order parts firm ) who is credited with bringing it back to its Buick-grilled state. He later sold it to the Blackhawk Collection in Northern California and there were three other owners before it reached Wayne Barnes, an official with the Academy of Art in San Francisco, a school which, handily, teaches car design. ---------------------- Thanks for any clues on prices, and I welcome opinions of when this car was bargain priced...

New information: There was an auction of the Warshawsky auto collection from 1996 which include, the one-of-a-kind car was designed by Fernandez and Darrin in Paris. What I am hoping to find is what Warshawsky paid for it and what it was sold for at the auction. I'd also like to hear from anyone who remembers the teenagers that drove it around with a Rolls grille...pretending it was a Rolls town car

While the said car above was a great design I think ol' Rudi did better in terms of publicity with the topless bathing suit. Anyway I borrowed his car around '70-72 for an hour and broke the trans. I was wondering who owns that chocolate brown notchback coupe now and if anybody remembers what it sold for at auction or any other time? There were only some 500-odd Nash Healeys made so I don't think it's too much of a needle in the haystack...

I admired this car when I saw it in magazines 60 years ago though I admit when I saw it in person I thought the rear deck a little "busy". I read that Chairman and CEO of American Motors, Roy Chapin Jr. put the car in his personal collection and it eventually was acquired by Joe Bortz for his collection for dream cars. I was wondering if it was ever published what Chapin sold it for and what year that was--how many decades after the car was built?

Yes that is the one. The resolution on the picture is poor but I can deduce two things--the Thor is parked next to a one-off DeTomaso Longchamp wagon made for Mrs. DeTomaso to drive around with her beloved dogs (which she competes with in dog shows), which makes me think it is indeed pictured in the DeTomaso museum, such as it was. The second conclusion is that it has a NJ license plate. Mrs. DeTomaso's family was based in NJ , and Rowan Industries HQ was there so I think it was licensed and registered in the U.S. so could have been brought here. Since Ford bought out Rowan Industries shares of Ghia iby 1973 I don't think they wanted to keep an Oldsmobile around Ghia, so maybe the Thor got sold when the DeTomaso Museum was liquidated of assets and several of the prototypes sold off. I would love to hear if the Thor has shown up at any auction.

Bonjour, Philippe I was wrong, the car I originally was trying to find is the Oldsmobile Thor, done by Ghia (and Giugiaro at Ghia) see on this website www.carstyling.ru/en/car/1967_oldsmobile_thor/ I think it is better than the NART Zagato but the roofline looks very Tom Tjaarda-ish so I guess I will write Tom to see if he remembers it. There is a little confusion there because when Giugiaro left, Tjaarda took over Ghia chief designer spot and had to finish some of what Giugiaro started. Is the Thor kicking around European auctions? Thanks

Jack: Yours is the type of rat rod I think I would like to own because it's engineered safely. I wish I could say the rat rods I saw at the Rockabilly Extravaganza were similarly well engineered but I am not a mechanic and wouldn't know. Suffice to say, I think some of them were congealed assemblages of junk, maybe trailered or flat bedded from nearby to appear as if they were/are roadable and arrived under their own steam. I don't know why they aren't pulled over by the constabulary and all the violations written up--maybe no ticket book has enough pages! But even the ones made of old junk parts are still justifiable to exist as "protest cars" against the wanton overspending displayed on rods built by Chip Foose and his imitators. I remember Terry Cook , once of Petersen Publishing, told me he turned off on hot rods when he saw the winner of the Ridler Award at the Detroit Autorama had over $400,000 invested in it. "And all they had was another '32 Ford," he said. So I can see rat rods being built to be counter to that. But I wouldn't want to drive too far in one of the really edgy ones. By the way, Cook now builds cars that are vaguely French, Delahaye and Delage inspired but with hot rod roots. He can now sell them for those high prices but at least you're getting a car that looks just right at a cocktail party in Paris...

And I think you're right, but am I right in thinking Collins sold his roadster because he was working on the DeLorean by then? Or is my timeline off? And has the white roadster showed up at any auction or is it in the Bortz collection. By the way I was a copywriter on the Chevy account around '67-69 and I remember how disgusted the fat old GM brass were with DeLorean's shenanigans, going out with movie actresses, and driving a Maserati Ghibli and having his picture in FORTUNE bare chested ,pumping iron. He made the other brass look like old fogies and made a lot of enemies. For that alone, I think conservative guys like Roche shot down anything proposed by DeLorean.

I started a new thread on this car because I feared my previous question about the car would be lost in the Fernandez & Darrin thread. I was fascinated in reading about this car created by Fernandez and Darrin in Paris in 1937 (but finished by Franay) but am a little confused as to which one is which because apparently there are two of them. I would like a referral to a URL that shows pictures of the one Roy Warshawsky of J.C. Whitney fame owned, as I think it's the one that for a while was fitted with a Rolls Royce grille by some high school or college guys who wanted to play like it was a chauffeured limousine. That might have been in Flint MI. I don't know if that is the same car once owned by Countess Max de Polaska of Poland. This picture at Pebble Beach shows one of the two but I don't know if it was the one temporarily grilled as a Rolls http://www.ultimatecarpage.com/gallery/41641/Duesenberg-J-Murphy-Custom-Beverly-Sedan.html Does anyone have an article which says who it was owned by during that "temporary Rolls" period? I think I heard someone talking about it at a car show once. I wonder what that family sold it for? I'd like to hear a price for it back when it wasn't yet a recognized classic (it really doesn't look Buick-ish until you see the present Buick grille)>

On the Fernandez & Darrin designed sedanca de ville, I recall sitting at a car show and hearing a man about 40 telling a friend that his family once owned that car back East and that as lads, they replaced the grille with a Rolls Royce grille, and had fun driving it around with one of them dressed as a chauffeur. Has anyone else heard that story and know if it has been printed anywhere? I would like to find out when that was, what they bought it for and what they eventually sold it for (maybe with the Buick grille back on it?). I personally think town cars really would have been politically incorrect after WWII when they were being depicted in cartoons as cars owned by crass industrialists...

If I was going to write a story about it, I wouldn't say "hid" because that sounds like they were trying to deliberately obfuscate the location of the car to management, let's just say it's like in the Army where the sergeants gradually build up their own little empire by moving things around so that the things they want end up where they are. It's not hiding, it's just shuffling stuff around until it is of zero importance to management. I bet that happened to a lot of prototypes including the short wheelbase Mustang show car designed by Vince Gardner who went so far as to wall it into a hiding place, it took them almost a year to find it.

I one time ran across a site in Spanish that showed the two seater roadster, though I thought it was yellow I see pictures of it now at an auction in red. I think this spawned the Dual Ghia when Gene Casaroll bought rights to the design. This website shows it at auction http://www.barrett-jackson.com/Archive/Event/Item/1954-DODGE-FIREARROW-IV-CONVERTIBLE-CONCEPT-CAR-43646 I wanted to ask if anyone remembers what country it was found in (Venezuela?) and what year and how much it was bought for there? I think Chrysler sold the dream cars outside the US so they wouldn't have to pay import taxes if they sold them from the US. Thanks for any tips,

George Barris always painted his cars. If they were for himself, he liked a candy gold. My remarks are mostly toward rust-colored or dull metal (steel with a protective coating but no paint or primer( cars.I'll go ahead and put my rough draft here for you readers to defend or pick apart like matadors with those swords... RAT RODS: Yes, they still exist, but are seldom found… By History Buff I remember when I discovered rat rods. It was only about five years ago, when I went to an early Saturday morning event called “Donut Derelicts” that takes place in Huntington Beach, not far from the ocean. I remember there were some sports cars, some classic postwar cars and a few prewar there, but over in the corner, almost unnoticed, were some scuzzy unpainted hot rods. I went over there and discovered that the owners showing those cars were uniformly, grizzled older guys who looked like they could have actually built those cars 30, 40 years ago. I asked them “Why aren’t your cars painted?” and they answered proudly “Oh we don’t believe in paint.” I dismissed them as an aberration, as I had been to hundreds of concours on the west coast and never seen cars like this—cars that looked precariously welded together, as if all it would take to have an instant dis-assembly was taking one railroad track crossing at speed. And for the next few years, I didn’t see any Rat Rods. But recently, in November 2014 I went to an event called “Bo Huff’s Rockabilly Extravaganza” in Riverside, CA and saw that there are dozens and dozens of them right here in Southern California, though the event also attracted owners of ‘50s style “lead sled” custom cars and musclecars. Based on what I saw, here’s my definition of true “Rat Rod.” They are cars that are put together without any heed to how they will look painted because, to some builders, they may never be painted. Paint is for sissies. They are assemblages of the shapes and pieces they happen to like. The engine is usually on display either with no hood or a big hood scoop or hole for the carburetors. Sometimes the exhaust pipes are headers with no pretense at a muffler, just four pipes jutting out each side and upward or downward. The true Rat Rod also recycles used parts not only from cars and trucks but from airplanes. The really “in” ones have “bomber seats” lightweight aluminum seats that were used in bombers in WWII. Sometimes with no padding or “temporary padding” that can be removed. The barer the interior is, the more metal that shows, the more “rat rod” it is. Since it’s California, I also saw Mexican blankets used in the upholstery or minimal carpeting. A few of them had pin stripes though you have to wonder what’s the point of striping something that is not painted? One writer in the field suggested that Rat Rods were brought back after a writer in Hot Rod magazine invented the term. That article postulated that the rat rods were embraced by bikers and "punk" elements of society. At the event I was at, I saw a little of that—the rat rodders were, by showing their cars, showing a kind of “screw you” attitude toward the people right across from them with custom cars that had lavished tens of thousands on special mag or chrome wheels, and metalflake paint. The rat rodders, by contrast, had cars that look like props for Max Max or some other post apocalypse movie. And, unlike the event I went to in Huntington Beach, the Rat Rods I saw in Riverside had plenty of support on the fashion side—the woman wearing either 1940s and 1950s hair styles and clothing, influenced by Betty Page, the famous soft porn model of the early ‘50s. The most spectacular female had a dress that looked like form fitting rubber. The men wore battered jeans, sleeveless jeans jackets or t-shirts or black leather jackets like Marlon Brando sported in The Wild Ones. And the tattoos—a lot of women had them, which surprised me, and a few of the men were completely covered with tattoos other than their faces! It is well known that employers are little frightened by tattoos so in a way the more extreme rat rodders, with their car as well as their tattoos seemed to be making a statement to society,saying in effect: “I don’t toe the line like you nine-to-fivers. I set my own social values. And screw you if you don’t like the way I or my car looks.” The extreme rat rods and customs have a “chopped top,” maybe one third to one half of its height taken out so you have to set the seat on the floor in order to see out of the car. The even more extreme actual rods use prewar bodies (usually ’32-’39 Fords) , where the body seems to sit almost on the ground. This could be an temporary illusion, in that hidden hydraulic pumps can jack the car up to the five inch legal minimum in a second, but I suspect some really don’t have much ground clearance. They just exist defying the law. In fact I think the more extreme a “rat rod” the more laws it violates but that seems to be part of the “in your face” attitude. The real pre-war looking ones have Ford flathead engines with the engine “soup-up” parts popular in the Fifties like Stromberg 97 carburetors. But most of the ones I saw at Riverside had small block Chevys. The most exotic one I saw had four Weber carburetors—the most exotic looking hot rod engine I’ve seen. Not all the Rat Rods I saw had fenders. There is an old law in California that says if a car weighs less than 1,500 lbs., it doesn’t require fenders. At least one had faired-fender skirts front and rear, sort of a crude imitation of a Figoni et Falaschi Delahaye circa late 1930s! As I left the event, I was wondering if I will ever see a gathering of rat rods again; as a group, they seem to be an elusive breed of owners, and though hot rods were seen at Pebble Bach a couple years back, these are much more crude, more “in your face” so don’t count on seeing any rat rods at concours d’elegance soon. But now I know they are out there; they might even be like cockroaches, in that they could survive WWIII, and after the smoke blows away, you’ll see rat rodders emerge with the first cars running…proving their undying spirit….

I went over to the Studebaker Club and read the six pages but they are all over the place on opinion;some feeling that rat rods are junk, others that they can be fun if you can get over the remarks some people make. I can sympathize with someone whose 100% stock car was still sent over to the spectator area at some concours because of the wrong air filter or something, enough things like that happen and you can see going to the world of rat rods where no one cares if it is original. When I used to go to concours with my Ferrari, I chose "non judged" class so there would be no hassles. And I kept a dead fly in the back window ledge and when people would comment on it I'd say "That's an Italian fly." No one on the Studebaker commentary mentioned the Steampunk angle. I define Steampunk as that era when all the new inventions, many steam powered, were coming along, and lots of prototypes were ingenious , made of brass (see the movie Wild Wild West). The essence of steampunk is to add wild things like magnifying lenses over small gauges, bulb horns shaped like snakes, There is a guy named Gary Wales in LA that builds hot rods out of old firetrucks but they are very steampunk, but finished too beautifully to be rat rods. So I say the whimsical steampunk element is a small part of rat rod-dom and good for a laugh. Also the pinup girls at the Riverside Rockabilly event were fun to see and brought out a lot more female participation in the car hobby that I have ever seen at a regular concours where everything on the car has to be oh-so-correct.